Dan Nadel on Philip Guston’s Jewishness Philip Guston, If This Be Not I, 1945, oil on canvas, 42 1/4 × 55 1/4". © The Estate of Philip Guston. TO BE A JEW in twentieth-century America was to be an outsider. We Jews gathered in temples and schools, we bought properties, physical and intellectual, to maintain control of our environments. We formed our own magazines. We exploited ourselves and others. Ashkenazi Jews can pass as non-Jewish when it suits us, or Jewish again when we wish to be “chosen.” And when blame is to be assigned, or walls ere...